Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. Limited Partnership Units

Hello and welcome to the BEP first quarter 2022 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. It is now my pleasure to introduce CEO Connor Teske.

Thank you, operator. Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2022 conference call. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that a copy of our news release, investor supplement and letter to unit holders can be found on our website. We would also like to remind you that we may make forward looking statements on this call. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and our future results may differ materially. For more information, you are encouraged to review our regulatory filings available on CDAR, EDGAR, and on our website. To kick off today's call, we will provide an update on the business. After my remarks, Natalie Adamate, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Transition Investing, will give an update on our growth initiatives. And then Wyatt will provide an overview on our operating results, as well as our balance sheet and liquidity. Following those prepared remarks, we look forward to taking your questions. Our business performed well in the first quarter. We continue to execute on acquiring assets for value, enhancing the cash flows of those assets with our operating capabilities, and leveraging our capabilities to drive decarbonization across the business. Clean energy occupies a uniquely complementary position to the global goals of low-cost energy, net zero emissions, and energy security. Put simply, the wind and the sun do not need to be imported and don't rely on substantial transportation infrastructure. These underappreciated benefits will become increasingly more relevant as energy security becomes a higher priority. This represents yet an additional tailwind to our business, and together with accelerating decarbonization trends, we'll continue to enhance the position of investors such as ourselves with capital, operating capabilities, and the development pipeline to accelerate the build-out of renewables at scale. We are seeing this trend actively play out within our own portfolio. An example? is our recently acquired German utility scale solar developer. In February, Germany's government announced an acceleration of the country's decarbonization targets, including increasing its target for solar to 200 gigawatts of capacity. As a result, we have injected additional capital into growing that business, and we are currently accelerating our business plan. including doubling the expected megawatts that will achieve ready-to-build status in the next two years. With a very substantial global development pipeline, which now sits at 69,000 megawatts, we expect to see several other opportunities to pull forward development and accelerate the deployment of capital at accretive returns throughout our portfolio. Some recent highlights for our business include we generated funds from operations of $243 million or 38 cents per unit, an 18% increase on a normalized basis over the same period in 2021. We secured contracts to deliver over 1400 gigawatt hours of clean energy annually, including 500 gigawatt hours to corporate off-takers. We continued to execute on our 15,000 megawatt under construction and advanced stage development pipeline. We closed or agreed to invest over $1.6 billion of capital across multiple transactions and regions, including our first investment in carbon capture solutions. And finally, we are progressing on approximately $560 million of asset recycling activities. selling non-core and mature assets, all while maintaining our robust financial capacity with almost $4 billion of available liquidity, no material near-term maturities, and limited floating rate exposure. Next, we want to spend a few minutes on our outlook for the business in light of inflation and supply chain trends. As central banks tighten monetary policy, markets are increasingly focused on the potential for sustained inflation in the future. We are very fortunate that regardless of whether inflation is either transitory or sustained, we expect our business to perform well. In fact, we see inflation as a tailwind for our operating assets given that approximately 70% of our contracts are indexed to inflation and have largely fixed cost structures. Perhaps most notable in this market, the cost of our primary inputs, sun, wind, and water, remains unchanged to where it was a year ago, which is they still cost zero, which compares to an over 50% increase in energy input costs for most alternative electricity generation. The compounding effect of inflating revenue streams should drive meaningful operating leverage across our business given that we have a relatively fixed cost and almost exclusively fixed rate debt. Our 15,000 megawatts of under construction and advanced stage development assets benefit from our focus on avoiding risk. We virtually always lock in the cost of major components when we sign a revenue contract. As a result, we believe we have matched our costs and revenues and locked in a large share of our target return. And while global supply chain disruptions continue to impact industry broadly, we remain well positioned as our diversified pipeline means we have no singular exposure to any country or technology. We have also secured inputs for substantially all development projects where we have signed a revenue contract and therefore have a delivery obligation. Most importantly, our scale, centralized procurement function, and strong relationships with both suppliers and customers allows us to manage these issues such that their net impact has not been material to our business. Overall, we have no concerns that these supply chain challenges will slow the growth of our business. In fact, it very likely could create opportunities for us as these challenges have reduced the supply of new projects as some developers will walk away or delay their projects, which, when combined with the continued growth in demand for clean energy, has increased the value of high-quality, ready-to-build projects that can meet customers' near-term needs. We are very fortunate to have many such projects in our pipeline and are seeing significant demand for their future generation in the form of higher PPA prices. In addition, elevated and volatile global energy prices has one, reinforced wind and solar's position as the cheapest form of bulk electricity production, and two, demonstrated the benefit of generation that is not subject to variable input costs. As such, we are confident that inflation or supply chain pressures will not drive a slowdown in the adoption of clean energy globally. In fact, we're seeing the opposite. We have seen a strong willingness from buyers of clean energy to accept higher prices as the benefits of decarbonization, energy security, and price stability far outweigh the small increases in costs we are facing. We see tremendous tailwinds for both our sector as well as our business specifically, which should lead to a strong year in 2022 for Brookfield Renewable. With that, I'll turn the call over to Natalie to discuss our growth initiatives.

Thanks, Connor, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be with you here today to talk about some of our recent growth initiatives and some of the exciting opportunities that we see for our business in the near term. Decarbonization has been firmly established as a priority of global leaders, and while climate change has been a focused topic for governments for years, the pace at which corporates are making commitments to lower emissions to net zero are now accelerating at a rapid pace. Achieving net zero emissions will require a massive amount of capital. It's estimated that over $150 trillion will need to be invested through 2050 to drive the decarbonization of energy systems. That's approximately $5 trillion every year. Brookfield is rising to meet this capital need and, importantly, this exciting investment opportunity with the raising of approximately $15 billion for Brookfield's first flagship global transition fund, which is now in the final stages of closing. Brookfield Renewable will be the largest investor in that fund, meaning we will benefit from having scale capital to invest alongside of, which in increasingly volatile capital markets becomes ever more valuable. We believe the success of the fundraise demonstrates that in order to be a successful investor in decarbonization, it is essential to have both deep operating expertise, particularly in power markets and renewable energy, both of which we have proven track record in. The reason this expertise is so important is because about three quarters of global carbon emissions can be traced back directly or indirectly to power generation and the energy sector. Every business uses energy. Therefore, if you can help decarbonize the production of energy and electricity, you can also enable the decarbonization of every industry in the world. And if renewables are the first step to decarbonization, We think our platform puts us in a leadership position. We have a track record of evolving our strategy to add new clean energy generation types and other energy transition solutions when we see opportunities to invest in scale at the appropriate risk adjusted returns. We are driving decarbonization across a growing opportunity set, and we are currently seeing more opportunities to deploy capital at our target returns. Today I want to highlight just a couple of these themes. The first, of course, is building and acquiring clean energy at scale. This quarter we made significant progress towards advancing our commercial contracting initiatives and are close to finalizing agreements with numerous multinationals to decarbonize their businesses in Asia, throughout development and build out of over 3,000 megawatts of wind, solar and storage capacity that will be backed by long-term fixed price contracts. We also announced our plans to submit joint bids with SSE to build two 750 megawatt offshore wind projects in the upcoming Dutch tender process. The second large growth opportunity is to use our knowledge of clean energy and are operating capabilities to provide energy transition and decarbonization solutions to businesses around the world that need help reaching their own decarbonization goals. Many industries will require both clean energy to lower their carbon footprints and capital to decarbonize their way of doing business. The power sector is a great example. Utilities require significant capital to enable them to shift from thermal to renewable, and we are well positioned to help. Finally, we are seeing opportunities for investments in businesses that provide services to support the transition to net zero. This quarter, we entered into a new decarbonization asset class with an investment in a leading North American modular carbon capture solutions provider. Given the trillions of dollars required to decarbonize hard to abate industrial sectors over the coming decades, we see significant potential to grow our carbon capture footprint over time. And we believe we're well positioned to do so given our strong expertise in decarbonization and our experience working as an operating partner and capital provider to our global network of like-minded customers. Our investment, will provide an attractive entry point into carbon capture solutions with a strong partner, a proven and cost-effective product, and a sizeable pipeline. We have committed funding of up to $300 million Canadian dollars for projects meeting pre-agreed return thresholds and have already begun funding the build-out of our first project. The structure of the investment provides us with strong downside protection and the securities are convertible into common equity of the company at our option at any time. If 100% of our commitment is invested, which we expect given the escalating carbon price and the proposed investment tax credit for carbon capture in Canada, then upon conversion, we will own a majority of the common equity of the business. Looking forward, with decarbonization and energy security firmly established as a priority of global leaders, We are focused on the continued build-out of renewables and the increasing demand for other decarbonization solutions, including carbon capture and storage, green hydrogen, and other energy service solutions. With that, I'll turn it over to Wyatt to discuss our operating results and our financial position.